On top of all that, I have no idea if the groundhog saw his shadow today or not. Stupid groundhog.

Video clip time. This is a mean one, dedicated to all the young rising stars who are having a hard time keeping their heads screwed on. It's a video I first saw on a syndicated late-night video program that featured videos from a single artist - locally, this was late on either Saturday or Sunday night. (This was before my family had MTV.)

This video blew my mind when I first saw it. This was back in 1980 or 1981. I was watching the video show because that week it featured videos by the band Blondie, and I was lusting after Debbie Harry - who, ironically, was 36 when this video came out; by most measures of celebrity, she had already missed out on fulfilling the message of the song. I was only familiar with a handful of Blondie songs at the time - "Heart of Glass", "One Way or Another", "Rapture", "Call Me", and "The Tide Is High". The last, with its tin drums and reggae influences, more closely resembled this song than any of the others. But what really freaked me out were the masks, the incoherent backing vocals, and the giant joints that everyone is smoking. Was Blondie a...a...drug band? My 13-year-old mind reeled at the thought. Or were they suggesting that the excesses of life would lead to the title of the song coming true?

So, for all you nihilists out there, here's Debbie Harry and the boys - the one and only Blondie - with "Die Young, Stay Pretty":

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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. DO NOT USE WITHOUT PERMISSION. PLEASE DON'T MAKE ME ANGRY. YOU WOULDN'T LIKE ME WHEN I'M ANGRY. YOU PROBABLY WOULDN'T LIKE ME WHEN I'M NOT ANGRY, SO WHY NOT AVOID THE ISSUE ENTIRELY?